


Of rats and people.

by chrundletheokay



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Canon Typical Misogyny, Gen, M/M, autistic Charlie Kelly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 12:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18180422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrundletheokay/pseuds/chrundletheokay
Summary: Mac shoves Charlie away, his face contorted with angry lines and creases. “Dude, are you copying me again?” he screeches. “You know I can’t stand that shit! I’m trying to tell a story here.”[Charlie watches people. And rats. It's the same thing, really.]





	Of rats and people.

Charlie watches people. Studies them, really. Not in the way he does with the Waitress. Not with the same amount of scrutiny and meticulous documentation, but he watches and mentally files away all the lessons he learns.

He listens to people’s words and patterns of speaking and tries to imitate them. He notices how close people stand to each other, the seemingly casual way they touch. He watches their gestures and body language, trying to decode which gestures go with which words, and which stance and posture goes with which emotion. Occasionally, he even mirrors people’s body language and gestures as he watches, but that usually pisses people off when they notice him doing it.

Like Mac now, who is gesticulating wildly as he tells a boring story, something stupid and embarrassing about seeing a guy that looked like Chase Utley at the gym. Charlie is willing to bet his entire measly janitor’s salary that it wasn’t Chase Utley, who no doubt works out at a much cooler gym with the other sportsball players. That way, guys like Mac won’t creep on him mid-workout.

Mac pauses, looks at Charlie, and puts his hands on his hips. Charlie looks back at Mac, and mirrors his stance.

Mac scowls. Charlie scowls back.

Mac shoves Charlie away, his face contorted with angry lines and creases. “Dude, are you copying me again?” he screeches. “You know I can’t stand that shit! I’m trying to tell a story here.”

Charlie shrugs and settles down onto a bar stool next to Frank.

“Monkey see, monkey do,” Frank says sagely, as if to explain Charlie’s behavior. (Frank clearly thinks he’s smart, but Charlie suspects he read that saying on a fortune cookie.)

“Whatever,” Dennis snaps, waving Frank off. “Mac, I _guarantee you_ that dude was not Chase Utley.”

And in one fell swoop, Dennis has dismissed Charlie’s behavior, Frank’s stupid explanation of Charlie’s behavior, and Mac’s obnoxious story.

Now that’s _real_ power. He wonders how Dennis is able to do that, to think on his feet like that and come up with words and arguments so quickly.

Mac whines back with a loud rebuttal, but Charlie’s done studying him.

_Dennis_ , see — Dennis is interesting. He’s so goddamn self-absorbed that he acts like he thinks people are watching him at all times. Like people are only ever thinking about him, and what he’s doing, and how he looks doing it.

Sometimes, Dennis stands posing at the bar, all stiff and unnatural, like he’s thinks he’s a mannequin in a shop window instead of an actual human being. Yet paradoxically, he rarely notices when Charlie’s _actually_ watching him.

Dennis thinks he’s smart because he’s the only member of the gang who graduated from college. But Dennis doesn’t realize that he went to college for four years and was _done_.

Charlie, meanwhile, is still studying, long after the rest of the gang have graduated. Or, in Dee’s case, long after she was expelled and institutionalized as a result of being charged with attempted murder by arson. (As a specialist in bird law, Charlie’s not familiar with the finer details of Dee’s legal case; this is the kind of behavior one rarely sees in birds.)

After decades of studying, Charlie feels as if he’s getting somewhere. He’s really making progress. Except for that one blip at the high school reunion, he hasn’t been hung up by his underwear in decades. Or had his head flushed in a toilet. Or been locked up in a locker. There’s more to it than just leaving high school, too, because he did okay _working_ at a high school. No one bullied him, except for Dee, who pretended she didn’t want to be best friends with him.

Charlie’s definitely getting better at The People Stuff, though. Because it’s not just humans he studies now — it’s the rats, too. Ever since they opened Paddy’s, and Mac and Dennis forced him to bear the burden of the rat duty by himself, Charlie has studied the rats’ behavior in an attempt to control and outsmart them.

Left alone for an entire day, Mac and Dennis and Dee couldn’t catch a single rat between the three of them. Charlie, meanwhile, singlehandedly keeps the entire rat population in check day after day, and that’s because he _understands_ them. It’s easier to destroy what you understand. Dennis, of all people, should know that. But perhaps his arrogance kept him from realizing the nuance and strategy involved in Charlie’s line of work.

“I just don’t think it’s a very interesting story, bro,” Dennis says, gesturing expansively with his half-empty beer bottle. “You _thought_ you saw Chase Utley at the gym. Well maybe _I_ thought I saw _Madonna_ at the supermarket. Who cares?” He’s already a little tipsy, half-shouting as if Mac’s all the way across the bar and can’t hear over a noisy crowd. Except the bar is empty and quiet, and Mac’s only a few feet away.

They’re never far apart, the two of them. Charlie’s noticed.

They haven’t noticed that he’s noticed.

(Charlie even caught them in the alley one morning, Mac pinning Dennis up against the brick wall, his mouth pressed to Dennis’s neck like some kind of gay vampire. To save them all the agony of listening to Mac’s explanation of how _totally not gay_ it was, Charlie just rolled his eyes, and went around to go through the front door instead. They didn’t notice that, either. An atomic bomb could’ve gone off, and they probably wouldn’t have noticed with how busy they were, sucking face. Or neck. Whatever.)

Charlie watches Dennis wave around his beer bottle, using it to gesture along with his loud monologue. He practices mirroring Dennis’s movements with his own beer bottle, which he quickly drains so that no liquid will slosh out. He really doesn’t feel like mopping again.

“‘Like A Virgin’ was a game-changer, you savages,” Dennis rambles. His bottle narrowly misses Dee’s face. “And I don’t care if you think virginity is a social construct, Dee, you slut, because that’s the whole _point_ of the song.”

“I know that, you whore,” Dee snaps. “And you know how I know that? Because I’m the one who told you that. _Mac_ here was the one trying to convince you that it was about Madonna taking one of those creepy virginity pledges.”

“I mean, the song is called ‘Like a Virgin.’ And Madonna obviously wasn’t one, so…” Mac trails off, and takes another sip of beer. Charlie isn’t sure what exactly they’re talking about at this point, but knows it’s good that Mac at least has the sense to sound abashed. “Anyway, it was a totally reasonable theory, and you guys all know it, too,” Mac concludes.

Frank, Dee, and Dennis burst out in exclamations of dissent and disbelief. Mac jumps to his feet, shouting back at them, knocking his beer bottle over in the process.

Charlie wasn’t surprised to learn that rats sometimes eat their young, because rats and humans have a lot in common that way. Rats and humans are a lot alike in general. It’s no coincidence, therefore, that neither the rats nor the gang listen when Charlie tells them that.

Either way, rats eat their young, in much the same way that the gang isolates the weakest member at any given moment — usually Dee — and attacks with biting sarcasm, insults, and schemes. Whatever it takes to stay on top. Sacrificing the weakest to ensure the strength and success of the rest of the colony. Or the gang. Whatever.

Right now, it looks like Mac is the baby rat.

It’s weird how Dennis can flip like that. How, just this afternoon, he was holding Mac close in the keg room, murmuring _baby boy_ in Mac’s ear. And now, by closing time, he’s metaphorically sinking his teeth into the soft skin of Mac’s neck, like Mac is a baby rat he’s trying to murder and eat.

Dennis is pointing his finger in Mac’s face now, shouting, and Dee is shouting too. It’s too loud in the bar with all of the shouting. Charlie’s only been half-listening, but it seems like they’ve all gotten way too worked up over something really stupid. It’s hardly the first time, though.

Charlie can scream with the best of them. If he wanted to, he could probably scream louder than the rest of the gang combined.

But sometimes it gets to be too much — too loud, too overwhelming, until his head fills with static and buzzing, like on a TV when the cable goes out. Like the no-man’s land of static in between radio stations, words and sentence fragments from other channels filtering through in disjointed gibberish.

Frank is an old man; Charlie should get the mop, and clean Mac’s beer off the floor, before Frank slips and falls and breaks a hip. Charlie heard rumors from his students about how bad it was when Dee made exactly that happen to their old fart of a theater teacher, whose job she probably wanted to steal anyway.

Charlie makes his way to the basement. When he opens the door, light from the bar illuminates his path down to the bottom of the stairs. Five rats scurry out of the dim patch of light, into the shadowy depths of the basement.

Very interesting indeed.

Charlie will have to keep an eye on them. Those rats can spread like a plague.


End file.
